"The Head of This Clerical Revolt"

"What the US urgently needs now, metaphorically speaking, is a national champion, a sort of modern-day Saint George to slay the dragon, save the people and ensure the triumph of good over evil. Who, in reality, might fill this role of moral saviour?"

Simon Tisdall at The Guardian says that Pope Leo can "confront Trump, to positive effect, on poverty, inequality, migrants, civil rights, Russia, Palestine and other pressing issues."

"Is Our Democrats Learning?"

"I hate to be a tough grader on all this but that's how it looks right now. The progressive moment is still over. It's just Democrats don't seem to realize it. When they'll wake up is anybody's guess."

Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot assesses the Democratic Party six months after the 2024 presidential election.

"Tendency to Overreach Should Provide Plenty of Ammunition for Building a Backlash"

"Again, Trump is drawing on longstanding public hostility to the federal government and to the size and cost of government as a spur to inflation and a burden on taxpayers. Fighting him with alarms about his violation of legal and constitutional limitations on presidential power are unlikely to work with an electorate unmoved by Trump's earlier scofflaw attitude. Voters must be convinced in very concrete terms that what he is doing will affect their own lives negatively."

Ed Kilgore at New York gives advice to Democrats.

"Rooted in the Blood of More Than 700,000 Americans Who Died in the Civil War"

"Section 1's origins lie deep in our past. It is rooted in the petitions of African Americans during and after the American Revolution that demanded freedom and natural rights for their service to the patriot cause. It stems from many ideas and strategies of the British and American abolition movements. It echoes Thomas Jefferson's inclusion of equality among 'these truths' in the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln's use of the same word in the Gettysburg Address, as well as his full-throated embrace of immigration well before the Civil War. Its most direct and powerful harbinger is the emancipation of nearly 4 million slaves in the midst of the war. Without that greatest transformation in American history, there would be no Fourteenth Amendment—no birthright citizenship and no equal-protection clause either, a codification just as sacred."

David W. Blight at The Atlantic responds to Donald Trump's attempt to end birthright citizenship.

"To Create the Sound of a Council Estate Singing Its Heart Out"

"Beyond all the noise about chart battles, sibling rivalry and Cool Britannia, the Oasis narrative was such a powerful one because it pointed to how a valuable new form of 'oceanic feeling'–Sigmund Freud's term for an all-embracing mass consciousness–might emerge in Britain in the dying days of the 20th century. For all its broadness and frequent crudeness, the collective mood that Oasis inspired was at heart an inclusive one, based on the desire to advocate a more demotic, more democratic way of national being, rooted in the lived reality of working-class experience."

Alex Niven at The Guardian reacts to the Oasis reunion.

"A Philosophical Brief in Defense of Liberalism"

"Living this liberal vision, for Obama, means accepting the diversity inherent to a large society made up of people with all sorts of beliefs and worldviews: recognizing that 'our fellow citizens deserve the same grace we hope they'll extend to us.' It means understanding 'true freedom' as something that gives all of us the right 'to make decisions about our own life [and] requires us to recognize that other people have the right to make decisions that are different than ours.' And it means seeing democracy as more than 'just a bunch of abstract principles and a bunch of dusty laws in a book somewhere,' but rather 'the values we live by.'"

Zack Beauchamp at Vox reacts to Barack Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention.

And Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect looks back to the Democrats' 1924 convention.

"We Presume We Understand It as Long as We're Not Asked to Explain It, but It Becomes Inexplicable as Soon as We're Put to the Test"

"As with climate change, however, the only thing more difficult than such an effort would be trying to live with the alternative. Whiteness may seem inevitable and implacable, and Toni Morrison surely had it right when she said that the world 'will not become unracialised by assertion'. (To wake up tomorrow and decide I am no longer white would help no one.) Even so, after 350 years, it remains the case, as Nell Irvin Painter argues, that whiteness 'is an idea, not a fact'. Not alone, and not without much work to repair the damage done in its name, it still must be possible to change our minds."

In a 2021 Guardian article, Robert P. Baird explores the "invention of whiteness."

"'Let Me Make the Songs of a Nation, and I Care Not Who Makes Its Laws'"

"The reasons for these disparities go beyond modern policy differences and extend back to events that predate not only the American party system but the advent of shotguns, revolvers, ammunition cartridges, breach-loaded rifles and the American republic itself. The geography of gun violence—and public and elite ideas about how it should be addressed—is the result of differences at once regional, cultural and historical. Once you understand how the country was colonized—and by whom—a number of insights into the problem are revealed."

At Politico, Colin Woodard writes that "Gun Violence Is Actually Worse in Red States."

"Clearly, This Constituency Does Not Harbor Particularly Radical Views on the Nature of American Society and Its Supposed Intrinsic Racism and White Supremacy"

"They are instead a patriotic, upwardly mobile, working class group with quite practical and down to earth concerns. Democrats will either learn to focus on that or they will continue to lose ground among this vital group of voters."

Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot says that Democrats have a "Hispanic Voter Problem."

"The Army's First Centralized School for Intelligence and Psychological Warfare"

"I was proud to be in the American army and we were able to do what we had to do.  I don't think we're heroes.  But the opportunity to help fight and win the war was a wonderful way.  I can look anybody straight in their eye and say I think I've earned the right to be an American.  And that's what–that's what it did for me."

Jon Wertheim at 60 Minutes interviews some of the last surviving Ritchie Boys from World War II.

"An Issue Is Not Necessarily Completely Invalid Just Because Fox News Mentions It"

"Democrats would be well-advised to focus instead on an inclusive nationalism that emphasizes what Americans have in common and their right not just to economic prosperity but to public safety, secure borders and a world-class but non-ideological education for their children. That's much more likely to work than simply denying a lot of these issues are problems."

Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot warns Democrats of the "Fox News Fallacy."

"A 'Ninety-Minute Englishman'"

"Hobsbawm asks why so many were drawn to this project. A large part of the answer, he suggests, is that it 'filled the void left by failure, impotence and the apparent inability of other ideologies, political projects and programmes to realise men’s hopes'. That was true then, and it is true now. John Denham may be right about the need for an English parliament. But no separate legislature, no sense of Englishness, will assuage the feeling of abandonment and loss of control that pervades much of politics in England. That requires a different kind of political project."

At The Guardian, Kenan Malik writes that he loves "the football team but can't get tribal about England."

Push and Pull

"Biden officials tend to discuss the 'push factors,' the conditions that prompt migrants to flee their countries in Central America. But changing those underlying conditions, even if doable, is a long-term proposition. What we have much more direct control over is the 'pull factors,' our own policies and practices that create an incentive to come here."

Rich Lowry at Politico says that President Biden's "border policies are creating a migrant surge that risks running out of control."

Anti-Anti-Trump from the Left

"It should go without saying, though I know it does not, that none of this is a defense of these Trump failings or an attempt to mitigate the harms they caused. What this argument is, instead, is a vehement rejection of the grotesque historical revisionism that seeks to erase and whitewash the far worse moral evils, acts of violence and assertions of lawlessness that preceded him, all in order to propagate myths of American Exceptionalism and, worse, to rehabilitate the reputations and careers of the political and media cretins who perpetrated them."

Glenn Greenwald at Substack argues that "No Matter the Liberal Metric Chosen, the Bush/Cheney Administration Was Far Worse Than Trump."

"It's Not Too Early to Say Thank You"

"Don't let the pundits distract you from the numbers. As Democrats eke out slim victories in new battleground states like Georgia and Pennsylvania, Black women have made all the difference. Exit polls report that more than 90 percent of Black women cast their ballots for Biden and Harris, voting as a bloc. Their nearest rivals in 2020 are Black men, 80 percent of whom supported the Democratic ticket, making Black women's impact unparalleled."

Martha S. Jones at Talking Points Memo credits black women for Donald Trump's defeat.

But Musa al-Gharbi at NBC News warns readers that "people from historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups often hold very negative opinions of people from other minority populations—and do not seem to approach social issues in intersectional terms."

"The Soundtrack to a National Identity Crisis"

"French rap's ascent from peripheral subculture to mainstream staple began during the golden era of 90s US hip-hop. Inspired by the political rhymes of Public Enemy, rap français built its reputation on vociferous social criticism, opposing racism and police brutality. The commercial achievements of the groups Suprême NTM and Iam helped make France the largest hip-hop market outside the US, which it remains to this day."

At The Guardian, Michael Oliver looks at "the most successful French popular music movement of all time."

"A Long, Four-Decade Pause"

"It's not the first time politicians have latched on to economic unrest and public safety concerns to press a hard-line, anti-immigration agenda. In 1921, Congress passed, and President Warren G. Harding signed, the 'Emergency Quota Act,' sharply reducing the number of immigrants permitted to enter the country. A putative response to rising unemployment and social unrest, in reality the law represented the culmination of decades of racial and religious-motivated bigotry against newcomers from southern and Eastern Europe and Asia. It also portended a long, four-decade pause in the country's openness to immigration."

Joshua Zeitz at Politico compares Donald Trump to Warren Harding.

"The Mainstream Left Is in Serious Trouble in the West"

"The ethnic change that is transforming western societies makes cultural issues more relevant, benefiting the Right while harming a Left that finds itself hemmed in by progressive norms, unable to adapt to new electoral realities."

Eric Kaufmann at Law & Liberty explains "Why the Left Is Losing."

"The Bohemian-Proletarian Coalition Is Dead"

"All across the world, left-wing parties can—and should—win elections on the promise to fix capitalism by standing up for the interests of working people. And all across the world, they can—and should—fight for an inclusive patriotism that promises solidarity to all citizens, irrespective of the color of their skin, their sexual orientation, or their religion. It remains possible for the left to build a broad coalition on a principled message. But to do so, it first needs to recognize that its old political strategy has become obsolete—and that an exclusive focus on mobilizing voters who already have all the 'right' views is unlikely to compensate for the loss of its historic base."

Yascha Mounk at Democracy argues that in "most developed democracies, social and cultural issues have, over the past decades, displaced economic ones as the principal political cleavage."

"Legible States"

"I don't think these stances can be explained merely by Trump's much-discussed fondness for Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping. The notion that the central government's control over the contested regions should be made official, recognized, and unambiguous accords with his overall worldview."

Joshua Keating in Slate writes that "[w]hen hard-line nationalists take power, such ambiguity in borderlines is no longer tolerated."